A lay Vatican employee was paid a fee by a Swiss bank for investing Vatican funds there, according to a report in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Fabrizio Tirabassi, who handled investments for the Secretariat of State, reportedly was paid 0.5% of the Vatican funds deposited with UBS. That percentage fee helped Tirabassi to accumulate his own account of over $1 million with UBS, the paper reports.

Remarkably, lawyers for Tirabassi did not deny that he received a fee from the bank, but said that the payments to him were approved by his superiors at the Secretariat of State.

Tirabassi was suspended from his Vatican post after the police raid on the offices of the Secretariat of State in October 2019, and was eventually charged by Vatican prosecutors with embezzling funds.

Last year it emerged that Tirabassi, who was involved in complex financial transactions surrounding a controversial London real-estate deal, had been given a position as director of one of the corporations that sought to profit from the deal.